Roundtable

Is office design killing productivity? Last month, a panel of office design experts, chaired by AJ technical editor Felix Mara and invited by Saint-Gobain Ecophon, discussed the situation facing office workers today

The media is full of stories about the detrimental impact of open-plan offices. Studies cite stress, disruption and lack of privacy and research indicates that excessive noise in the office severely reduces productivity, while 54% of office workers think the acoustic environment in their office makes it difficult to work. But are open-plan offices killing productivity or improving collaboration? Felix Mara Today were going to talk about the impact of office design on productivity, focussing mainly on acoustics, but also taking a holistic view. Well discuss the current state of play, then compare the acoustic design of other building types and conclude with possible solutions. Lets start by introducing ourselves, saying how office acoustics relates to our work. Russell Richardson More and more, were getting involved in sorting out offices that dont work, rather than getting in at the early stages to provide offices that do: in the past year the ratio has been at least three to one. To improve the office environment, this might involve sound insulation and layout or helping people improve building services. Office design is killing productivity, but theres no paradigm for good or bad offices. Benjamin Lesser Derwent is an investment company with about five million square metres of commercial buildings, with a pipeline for developing existing stock or acquiring new. We started by converting industrial buildings into workplaces. Weve taken early 20th century buildings and made use of attributes such as large volumes, robust materials and exposed services. Acoustics are part of this mix, but we find they are low in peoples priorities. Weve gone a long way from traditional cellular office environments; people enjoy socialising while they work and open-plan environments suit todays focus on collaboration. 15.11.12

46 theaj.co.uk

all photography by thEoDorE WooD

Nic Crawley We work across all sectors, doing a lot of education, healthcare, offices and housing and weve enjoyed working with Derwent over the years. Its important that people can create space without taking out piles of fittings and partitions; Im not sure if weve ever put a suspended ceiling in an office. So for the warehouse, mediatype office, the funky, edgy space, thats what we do. And rather than killing productivity, I agree with Benjamin, people are keen to work in environments completely different to those of the past. Office design has increased productivity massively. But internal environments have significant acoustic issues. Ecophons survey of staff revealed 17 per cent of people say the environment is poor. Not good, but not a huge number. 51 per cent say things are OK and 27 per cent say its good. Its something we look at on each project. Were finding that as we move away from conventional ways of servicing buildings, background noise becomes an issue and has a masking effect, so were thinking about displacement, fan coils and natural ventilation. David Frise The AIS represents the fit-out end of the industry. In office acoustics, there isnt a simple yes or no. Its more subtle, we dont just conclude,

Yes, it destroys productivity, or No, it doesnt. Thats mainly because most clients dont specify many buildings in their life. They dont know how to and they dont admit to it. I spent many years in M&E, where clients dont value it until they havent got it. The same is true of acoustics. If you ask clients to invest in proper acoustics in their offices most would say, Id rather have this funky bit of furniture so you spend all your time rectifying the aftermath. Another big issue in big cities is air quality. In the future youll have to seal buildings and filter air more, which will affect acoustics and productivity. Tom Lloyd We started primarily as furniture designers and now work in research and strategy, looking at different types of shared space, including offices. Were interested in how people interact with strangers or colleagues. Efficiency and technology have led to more open-plan working. Flat screens mean smaller desks, so you dont need corners and you can now get eight people on to a bench rather than having an 1,800 x 1,800 L-shape from the 80s. Weve got to the point now where the bench is a common part of development, specification and design. Theres something to be said for the fact that people need big, open-plan, noisy spaces, that are

roundtable
Present Benjamin Lesser, development manager, Derwent London David Frise, CEO, Association of Interiors Specialists (AIS) Felix Mara, technical editor, The Architects Journal Jane Stead, head of workplace, ORMS Nic Crawley, associate and head of sustainability, AHMM Ricardo CantoLeyton, central concept developer, Saint-Gobain Ecophon Russell Richardson, director, RBA Acoustics Sharon Baker, regional sales manager, Saint-Gobain Ecophon Tom Lloyd, director, Pearson Lloyd Design

The way people react is very much affected by acoustics

great for collaboration, but these dont support focus, concentration, training and video conferencing. Sharon Baker Along with acoustic suspended ceilings, we also manufacture a lot of funkier, high-end acoustic solutions. Were aiming for a more holistic view, looking beyond office acoustics. We often get called in with architects, clients and developers, as consultants. So we try and look at whats going on in individual spaces; the people, the activities and the places. We have a conceptual team looking at whats up-and-coming in offices. For example, weve been involved with Google in Ireland. These are big investors who take a lot of notice of whats happening in their buildings. The message were trying to push is at the next step down, where theres less investment. Bad acoustic environments can hinder productivity, although I dont disagree with open-plan environments, as long as theyre good acoustically or there are breakout spaces.

Far left David Frise, AIS Left The panel Top right Jane Stead, ORMS Bottom right Ricardo CantoLeyton, SaintGobain Ecophon

15.11.12

47

Roundtable Office design

Ricardo Canto-Leyton My job is to explain the complex matter of acoustics in a simple way. I work with research communities to find ways to measure what people feel in offices. The way people react is very much affected by acoustics. The only sense we have while were asleep is hearing. If you hear a sound or stop hearing it, you wake up. Acoustic design is often misinterpreted as being solely aimed at producing quiet zones. Productivity in buildings is complex and hard to assess. What we do know is that if you do tasks that require concentration, silence will always be better than any noise. Thats the way it is. But are we really doing that much focussed work anymore? Jane Stead Theres a particularly interesting relationship between the workplace and education sectors at ORMS. My focus on the workplace is in understanding demand and relating that to building supply. I have a particular interest in research and in developing workplace strategies. Before ORMS I was at DEGW, where the focus is on measuring the performance of spaces and organisations. Open-plan working environments arent killing productivity. They actually support and increase it and research undertaken with GSK about four years ago supports this. When they reshuffled their R&D department, they opened up the office for senior members to sit with their teams. There was a 41 per cent increase in their products speed to market. Just putting people into an open-plan environment, giving everybody a desk and some breakout space, isnt the answer. There has to be engagement with the client to define their objectives and match them with the space. RR The issue with open-plan is always that theres a compromise. The skill is asking the correct questions and getting clients to write to you to confirm, so you have a piece of paper at the end. Once youve 48 theaj.co.uk

done that, you stand a chance of making it work and it can be made to work very well, but it also has the potential to murder productivity. FM Do you think following standards and codes might help with that briefing process? BL Theres definitely a problem where codes of best practice dont reflect the way we work. And therefore theres always a lag time, so on an institutional level where youve got to tick every box, you produce buildings that are over-specified and create environments that are too quiet. On one building I worked on, in order to get another BREEAM point we needed to introduce white noise. Absolutely crazy: a system above the ceiling to create noise because the office floor was too quiet, using power to get a BREEAM point. Those who dont understand the science will always over-specify. For a margin of safety theyll say, Yes, I need 45dB, I need all the bells and whistles in case theyre shot down later. For the past 20 years Derwent has been able to fund its own developments and take risks. In each building, weve tried to push the boundaries because we think thats what our occupier market wants. No ones telling us for sure and sometimes

we go against guidance. If thats a success, then in the next building we push the boundaries a little bit further, but we always research our target occupier market thoroughly. RC-L Its important that we compare the same things and speak the same language so that it doesnt depend on which consultants you speak to. Then everyone can go for the same acoustic quality, the same definition. RR And there are various routes to that point. What isnt changing is the human brain, or at least very slowly, and also the movement of sound in air and the way it reacts to materials. It may not be convenient for people who want to push things in a different direction, but there are times when you cant do certain things, because they will never work. Open-plan classrooms dont work. Even the best examples are terrible. TL But there are the choices you make about what type of space you need. Historically, in office planning, theres a big polarisation between open-plan and acoustically secure spaces. But there is a place for something in the middle which is an opportunity for design, productivity, specification, architecture and everything else.

Clockwise from top left Tom Lloyd, Pearson Lloyd Design and Sharon Baker, Saint-Gobain Ecophon; Russell Richardson, RBA Acoustics and Benjamin Lesser, Derwent London; Lesser and Nic Crawley, AHMM; Felix Mara, The AJ

15.11.12

BL Some lawyers are making the transition towards open-plan, but with breakout and meeting rooms. And these are lawyers, who have private clients and sometimes conicts of interest, but they are dealing with it on an open-plan oor plate because theyre nding their day is more enjoyable. is is a sector that is incredibly traditional, but times have moved on and even the older generation are seeing the benets. RC-L You can make sure early on that sound does not propagate or go from work group to work group and keep a low radius of sound spreading. SB Weve also started talking about acoustic etiquette in oces. Do people understand where personal calls are appropriate? BL Ive noticed over the past three or four years that if you go out at lunch break, everybodys on their phone having private conversations. e public realm has become private space because you can just chat away. No ones really listening so behaviour does change. e way we work nowadays is predominantly through a screen. So we need a bit more life in our oces. Its too quiet, so you try and lighten things with stu that goes on and you make spaces where you can have informal meetings because it adds a buzz. FM If we could go back to these survey ndings provided by Ecophon, which indicated that 54 per cent of oce workers think their acoustic environment makes it dicult to carry out their work, is it possible that the problem is with peoples perceptions of their environment, or are they being bullied into something they dont want? RR Maybe half the problem with these surveys is that people have never considered it and then somebody asks them a question. . .

An oce where you feel you have to put earphones on is a failure

RC-L e mix of people you ask is also critical, because they perform dierent activities. TL Two or three years ago the conversation was all about the fact that you were at your desk and then you could go somewhere to collaborate. Breakout isnt collaboration space. Its an old fashioned idea about putting coloured fabric in spaces. It doesnt really function as relaxation or a work space. But now its ipping towards an arrangement where collaboration space is your work space and you go somewhere else to concentrate. DF Is there an age dimension here? When I was younger I listened to music while I was working, but now I like silence. Am I alone, or should you consider that not everyone is young? RR An oce where you feel you have to put earphones on is a failure. If its an occasional thing where I need to concentrate, thats ne, but if I need to remove myself from the rest of my team and put headphones on, theres something wrong. One of the great strengths of open-plan oces is the ability to collaborate, but if youre removing yourself from that environment, youre not doing that. NC e only thing a company exists to do is make money, retain sta, reduce illness and stress levels and increase productivity anything to help the person at the desk. Good oce design can massively improve productivity and thats too infrequently recognised. TL It feels that the conversation for the industry is a technical one that needs to be demystied. ere is a role to educate or to have a conversation.

An acoustic engineer I once worked with was talking about having a lively sound and the correct mix of hard and soft, and all that. at kind of conversation needs to be more a part of the everyday language of design. RR Its dicult to translate between technical and creative disciplines, but there are tools available to us. We can do auralisation, so that you can listen to what sound might be like in a building, giving basic audio demos to architects to assess absorption in spaces where theres a particular degree of absorption. Its a language that others understand and I accept that when presenting numbers and graphs and talking about reverberation times and speech index, the best you can say is, Weve complied with the Building Regs and resolved the guidance. But at no point are you actually imparting an understanding. FM One thing thats come across very strongly is the value of experience and an empirical approach to design. Are there any other conclusions to discuss? NC An important consideration is building services and whether were naturally ventilating spaces. How that eects the internal environment is a big issue. What modications will we make in 30 years time when the street outside doesnt have noisy cars on it? BL If you design intelligently, you can have the best of both worlds: a densely occupied building that can be naturally ventilated for most of the year. e design end of the industry is trying to create working environments that are about people, not pounds and pence. Occupiers have come to realise that productivity drives a knowledge business, which is what the majority of businesses are. Id say oce design isnt killing productivity. Its very much the reverse. I

Many thanks to Saint-Gobain Ecophon for organising and taking part in the debate. ecophon.com